╣Daniel╠
“I got the fire going,” Erica said, smiling. She lifted up a cheap plastic lighter, and tossed it at me. Automatically, I caught it, and looked down at my hand.
She frowned, and walked to me – surprisingly easily. Oh, right. Erica was holding a stick, using it as a walking stick.
“Are you okay?” Erica asked, looking worried. “You don’t look so good.”
I gazed into her eyes, and started to laugh. “You’re worried about me?! You’re the one with the sprained ankle!”
***
♫Erica♫
I closed my eyes, and my head drooped to the side, stifling a huge yawn. It was so lovely and warm, next to the fire. God, I was tired. Why wasn’t Daniel yawning and stretching as well?
I glanced at Daniel, and jumped. He’d been staring at me, in a look of wonder mixed with confusion.
“What?” I said, nervously touching my hair – more of a reflex, I think. After all, my hair was already messed up, having almost drowned half an hour or so ago, and being dumped into the sand. After a near-death experience, I wasn’t really bothered about my hair.
“Nothing.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You’re being weird.”
He blinked. “What are you talking about? I’m…fine!”
“You paused,” I said, glaring at him.
“Excuse me?”
“You said, ‘I’m…fine’. Why did you pause? What did the pause mean? Are you lying?”
“Chill out, Erica,” he said, smiling. “You’re reading too much into silence.”
“It’s like Aristotle said, ‘In the absence of words, there is thought’.”
He looked at me for a minute. “You just made that up.”
“Yeah, but it sounded real, didn’t it?”
He started laughing. His whole face had transformed, from tired and empty, to bright and happy. He was a completely different person. His laughter was kind of like an innocent child’s – unaffected by the bitterness of the world.
This was the real Daniel.
“Yeah, I guess it did,” he chuckled. He looked away, up at the sky, at the millions of stars you would never see in the city.
My eyelids drooped. I fell forward, but Daniel caught me before I could burn my face off in the fire.
“I’ll lend you my lap, okay?” he said, gently pulling me towards him. “Just this once.”
“You don’t want to do that,” I protested, a giant yawn breaking my sentence. “My head’s very heavy. It’s full of important stuff.”
“Sure,” he chuckled, “but you just almost drowned. It’s only fair I give you some sort of special treatment.”
“You’re a nice guy, Daniel,” I said, my eyes closed, placing (okay, dumping) my head onto his lap. “Thanks.”
There was silence for a while, but just before I was about to go under, I remembered something I was meant to say to him before.
“By the way, I still hate you for what you did to Eric. You’re a bastard.”
My mind was hazy, but I think I heard him say something.
It sounded a lot like, “I know”.
***
My eyes opened, and everything was light. I sat up, and Daniel’s coat fell off me. Looking around groggily, I spotted a message in the sand.
